Math Question - Did anyone have to memorize squares to 30

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Hi All. For all the math lovers out there I was just curious but did any of you have to memorize your squares up to a certain number in high school? My math teacher had us memorize the squares up to 30 and we could do higher for extra credit. I still have them all memorized up to 30 today. It was useful I think in Trig and Calc at times. I was just curious how many other teachers did the same thing. I'm glad ours had us do this.

No, we just did the times table to 10x10 as they were still teaching long division and multiplication on paper and those hundred values could get the rest.

Ah ok. Ours taught long division and multiplication on paper as well. Makes me wonder how they are teaching it now. I was taught memorizing the squares in I think it was "Applied Math" or "Algebra I". I want to say it was "Applied Math". I started out on a nonacademic track and then switched to academic courses my sophomore year.[/quote]
TBH, it's been a few years since I had any involvement in math professionally, but it was quite honestly terrifying to have students that were at least a year into college math that couldn't do any of it without a calculator. One student in particular was in calculus 3 and couldn't do any arithmetic without a calculator. It's incredibly time consuming to have to go for the calculator for every problem and it makes quick estimates about the reasonableness of a given result a lot harder.

Memorization of squares is kind of iffy in terms of any real value, any of the integers being multiplied together up to about 144 is somewhat useful, beyond that, students have a lot of other things they can memorize that are of more value.

The way it's rationalized is that you'll always have a calculator with you and the concepts are important. The concepts were always important, but you've got calculators that can do basic approximations of simple calculus problems for under $20, but that shouldn't get students in some programs off the hook from knowing how to do calculus.[/quote]

I agree with you. I knew the squares up to 12 I think before that and for some reason he wanted us to memorize the squares past that up to 25 with up to 30 being extra credit. It came in help somewhat as I ran into some squares higher than 20 and didn't need to pull out a calc to know what the root was. I absolutely agree with you about it being kind of scary that students can't do anything without a calculator. I agree about the use of calculators in Calc too. I had a TI-89 graphing calculator but just mainly used the graph functions sometimes but I knew how to do some graphs without it.[/quote]

Growing up we had to learn to memorize them up to 10x10, but then learned up to 12x12 because I liked math? Later ended up memorizing up to 16x16 because 256 or 2^8 which is the max number of numbers (so 0-255) a single byte can represent in a computer.

I can't really see the benefit of memorizing past a point, since if you actually learn and memorize concepts and how to calculate you can always just put in a bit of work to get to the correct answer.
Also agree about the use of calculators as well, I think they have their place and are useful to expedite things once you truly understand the concepts.

in highschool??
we used slide rules

Not me.

The reason why I suck at maths is because I really don't even have the language comprehension to understand what's being pointed out.

However, when I suddenly started playing with numbers, that's when I actually learned multiplication is just addition of an addition.

But there are no encounters with 'playing with numbers' during classes at all.

It's just example problem then solution. Doesn't explain why is that the solution.
Most at the time all I see is steps 1 and last; and nothing in between.


Also no, memorization just won't do with me at all.

I did not have the compensatory basis related to patterns towards numbers like I do with words that I can turn into knowing spellings in elementary until I found that multiplication does has a pattern.

Again, no one ever pointed it out for me.
Let alone actually able to communicate an already very abstract concept that isn't easily communicated to someone like me who just doesn't have enough language comprehension to learn well with a largely verbal medium of learning.

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I didn't do algebra at school only long multiplication, addition, subtraction. I was even put a year behind at school and only left with foundational qualifications. The maths teaching I had was worse than useless. What I needed to learn the necessary maths wouldn't have been invented for another 40+ years after my school years. I did however manage to memorise the times tables from the 1s to the 12 times tables. I have later remembered the first 50 squares at 57-58 years old, I can do quadratic equations by factorising, completing the square and quadratic formula. I was taught a little of that at college but I dropped out of that because of my the seizures were getting frequent and thinking that sort of thing was triggering the seizures which was diagnosed in 1987 as epilepsy. Much later afterwards I managed to teach myself quadratic equations, sums and differences of cubes, evaluating limits differentiation and integration which is calculus. The teaching myself higher maths online could be done safely now that I changed my epilepsy meds to one that gives a reliable remission or that stops the seizures before they happen allowing me to learn a lot more years after school than during it. At school the teachers really didn't think I was the sharpest knife in the drawer. Ableism/neurobigotry. My main interest at college was chemisty though and maths is very important in physics and chemisty.

We only memorised the squares up to 13. I think that was because the 12 times table is acually pretty useful, and we were taught the 13 times table up to 13 to make it clear that "this does continue after 12, you know"!